Why Can’t Men Hold Their Sexual Energy?

“So do guys really just want to have quick sex and cum?” a client asked me the other day.

Here’s the age old problem; women typically want longer sex sessions, with more of a build up of erotic energy, guys tend to want to move ahead to “the main event” of penetration and ejaculate pretty much as soon as possible. Why?

The interesting thing about sexual energy is that although most guys spend a huge amount of time thinking about sex, planning ways to get it, fantasising about what they’ll do once they get there, when they’re actually in a sexual situation they want to get rid of that sexual energy as fast as possible by ejaculating it out of them. Interesting conundrum, right? Why spend all that time wanting something, only to discharge it as soon as you get the chance?

The answer lies in our upbringing. As boys we are taught that “big boys don’t cry”, we have to “be a big boy” or just “grow up and be a man”. Showing emotion isn’t something that was usually encouraged in our childhood as boys. In fact any sensitivity we did show back then was often mocked by our peers as well as discouraged by our parents. We may have been labeled as effeminate or ‘sissy’ for allowing our vulnerability to show. We learnt to “suck it up” and “take it on the chin, like a real man”.

As a result our capacity to deal with intense emotional states reduced. When strong feelings came up we just had to suppress them, squash them down so we didn’t feel them. Our ability to tolerate high emotional charge got lost along the way. This is also one reason that some men lose their tempers and enact aggressive or violent behaviours. They lose their tempers because they can’t hold them; they have no capacity to do so.

The problem is that when we suppress one set of emotions the human psyche does not seem able to selectively only suppress one set of potentially challenging emotions, such as sadness, anger, or fear. It turns down the volume on all types of feeling – joy, pleasure and love for example. Unfortunately a strong sexual charge is also something that we begin to lack the ability to “tolerate”.

If we get especially good at turning down the volume on emotions we find after a while that we also turn it down on sensations. So in order to feel anything we need more intensity – harder friction-based sex, more intense sensations. Its not because men are inherently rough and senseless, it’s because we’ve been trained not to feel – and yet we have a deep longing to feel ourselves. So we try increasingly intense methods in order to feel something, anything. In the process we create a downward spiral of desensitisation. The more intensity we try, the more desensitised we become.

So what’s the answer? It’s simple, as men we need to start feeling ourselves once more. We need to develop sensitivity. We need to stop banging away at women as though we were hammering nails into a piece of wood and start caressing and stroking, both them and ourselves. We need to allow ourselves to feel our feelings more deeply, to let ourselves show our vulnerability and to make this a sign of strength not of weakness. The only true strength is being able to allow our vulnerability to be expressed because we can only do that when we know we are strong enough to allow it, otherwise we suppress it. The irony is that when we allow ourselves to feel more, we can enjoy sex more and hold that sexual charge for longer – meaning that everyone involved is going to enjoy themselves much more.